This qualitative industry case study evaluates job quality in the Australian platform-based food-delivery sector, one part of the growing gig economy where workers, as independent contractors, engage ...in digitally-enabled and controlled work that is remunerated on a piece rate basis. Using a multi-dimensional framework, we draw on worker accounts of economic security, autonomy and enjoyment to assess job quality. This study posits that to achieve a more refined picture of job quality, both objective and workers’ subjective understandings of work need to be understood in the context of their respective ‘fit’ in terms of individual circumstances, labour market alternatives and the broader socio-political context. This multi-level analysis problematises individual accounts that risk overemphasising the positive elements of platform-based work. Moreover, rather than sitting neatly in a Post- or Neo-Fordist extension of job quality, the findings reveal that the gig economy is a new juncture in capitalist production, the consequences of which need to be taken seriously by regulators, scholars, workers and other relevant stakeholders.
ABSTRACT
This article explores the role that compassion plays in the building of a post‐Fordist laboring public in Italy. By exploring how the state has made compassion productive through new regimes ...of voluntary labor, this piece shows that compassion operates not as a mitigating force against, but as a vehicle for the production and maintenance of a new exclusionary order precisely because it allows for the emergence of a fantasy of spontaneously available public emotion. Affective labor is a desired form of activity for marginalized members of Italian society because it allows them to approximate the form of social belonging that was centrally institutionalized and cultivated within Fordist societies—that of the capacity to belong to and be publicly recognized by the world through waged work. Fordism thus appears not as an era past, but as an object of desire and mourning that still retains much social force as people attempt to recapture or at least approximate Fordist forms and feelings of stability and belonging.
As has been argued elsewhere, the model of public service management (the New Public Management, or NPM) that dominated public service reform since the late 1970s to the recent past both has been a ...flawed model and has failed in practice. Its pre-occupation with linear and Fordist models of public service delivery, culled from the manufacturing and production literature, has lacked congruence with the reality of public service management in an increasingly complex, fragmented and interdependent world (Osborne, Radnor, and Nasi 2013). This failure was un-necessary and avoidable. Again, as has been argued elsewhere, an alternative body of public management research and theory is available that addresses directly the nature of ‘service’ and ‘service management’ and which leads to very different approaches to public service management. This approach has become known as public service-dominant logic (PSDL) and the SERVICE framework (Osborne et al. 2015). The intention here is to argue both for a revised conceptualization of this approach and for a shift of emphasis within this emergent paradigm – both between co-production and value (co-)creation and between the respective roles of public service organizations (PSOs), citizens and service users in these processes. Consequently, this brief essay therefore avers that ‘PSDL’ is no longer either a necessary or a sufficient term for this body of public management theory. To acknowledge its growth into a distinctive body of theoretical body, this paper therefore argues for the replacement of ‘PSDL’ by the crisper term, ‘public service logic’ (PSL). This term maintains the link to service, rather than product-based, theory but distances it from being simply an offshoot of SDL. To make this point, this paper advances the need to consider co-production and value co-creation in a distinctive way that adds to public management theory. Whilst the concept of co-creation has been considered in public management theory in recent years, the discourse has suffered from conceptual limitations. In some circumstances it has been offered as inter-changeable with co-production (Gebauer, Johnson, and Enquist 2010), whilst in others it has been limited solely to ‘the involvement of citizens in the initiation or design of public services’ (Voorberg et al. 2017, 366, my emphasis). However, this is not the case. Co-production assumes a process where the PSO is dominant and where the logic is linear and based upon product-dominant conceptions of production. Co-creationassumes an interactive and dynamic relationship where value is created at the nexus of interaction. Value for the service user and the PSO thus are created not by linear production but rather by this interaction occurring within the context of the service user’s wider life experience (Grönroos 2011). This has significant implications for how we understand the relationship between PSOs and service users in public services delivery – and for what this relationships means for the value that public services create in society.
This paper analyzes three labor documentaries released from 1989 to 1991, which depict the United States’ assumed transition from a Fordist to post-Fordist economy. Feminist textual analysis focuses ...on the depiction of workplaces and gender roles in Roger and Me, American Dream, and Fast Food Women. The analysis demonstrated that discourses of epochal change in the context only held true if one looked at a slice of the U.S. labor market largely dominated by White men. Focusing on feminine sex-typed labor demonstrated the worst elements of industrial Fordism remained in post-Fordist workplaces. Long-standing sexual divisions of labor were unambiguously repeated in post-Fordist work and intensified in a discussion of the family wage.
The so‐called age of AI, industry 4.0, the fourth industrial revolution, etc. all attempt to conjure into existence a new technological paradigm. Should we believe the hype? This paper draws on ...neo‐Schumpeterian and régulation theory to widen the scope of this debate and examine techno‐economic and institutional discontinuities. In exploring these discontinuities, this paper argues, first, that growth regimes are not necessarily tenable as indicators of new paradigms, and, second, that there are (infra)structural discontinuities between the ICT/post‐Fordist era and those of the AI/platform era. Platformisation entails a distinct institutional logic, regime of accumulation (RA) and mode of social régulation (MSR). The clusters of technological and institutional changes behind this shift have not yet been sufficiently addressed by economic geography and associated literatures. In reconceptualising the shift in terms of (infra)structural discontinuity, the paper synthesises neo‐Schumpeterian and régulation theory to identify both technological and institutional changes in the régulation of capitalist accumulation.
This article explores how the ‘post-Fordist work ethic’ contributes to the formation of classed subjectivities. Drawing on the work of Kathi Weeks, the article approaches the post-Fordist promise of ...self-realisation through work in terms of the individualised accrual of value that has become so central to the experience of class within the cultural politics of neoliberalism. Empirically, the article draws on a programme of research on the formation of young workers to describe two ideal typical manifestations of the post-Fordist work ethic, characterised as ‘subjects of achievement’ and ‘subjects of passion’, which reflect classed differences in the way that self-realisation through work is defined and experienced. In this way, the article argues that the contemporary work ethic is inflected with forms of class distinction that pre-date the shift to post-Fordism, and that these distinctions within the post-Fordist work ethic are critical to classed modes of contemporary subjectification. This differentiation reflects the ideological history of work and class under capitalism as well as the promise of individualised self-realisation that is so critical to subject formation in the post-Fordist present.
ABSTRACT
Mass incarceration has been shown to be a force of racializations and class inequality in US life, but little literature has focused on the lives of prison guards. Highlighting the lived ...experiences of prison guards at two state maximum security prisons in Elmira, New York, a small multiracial city in central New York State, this article uses Cedric Robinson's notion of racial capitalism to show how prison expansion unfolds in New York State at the end of the twentieth century. Guard labor includes both the physical work of control and of basic social reproduction and is done by people who are connected to the cultures, histories, and political economies in which they were raised, what Elmirans often call one's “hometown.” I examine prison guards’ narratives of their racial encounters inside and outside the prison, their sense of their racialized selves, and their relationship to what they see as often boring, violent, and stigmatized work. I show how the expansion of the carceral state over the past forty years, the period most often referred to as mass incarceration, maintains Fordism's labor hierarchies in a retooled racialization: as jailer and jailed. prisons, whiteness, carceral state, racial capitalism, post‐Fordism
RESUMEN
El encarcelamiento masivo ha mostrado ser una fuerza de racialización y desigualdad de clase en la vida de los Estados Unidos, pero poca literatura se ha enfocado en las vidas de los guardianes de prisión. Resaltando las experiencias de vida de los guardianes de prisión en dos prisiones estatales de máxima seguridad en Elmira, Nueva York, una ciudad pequeña multirracial en el centro del estado de Nueva York, este artículo usa la noción de capitalismo racial de Cedric Robinson para mostrar cómo la expansión de prisiones se desarrolla en el estado de Nueva York a finales del siglo XX. La labor de guardián incluye tanto el trabajo físico de control como de reproducción social básica y es realizada por personas que están conectadas a las culturas, las historias, y las economías políticas en las cuales ellas fueron levantadas, que las de Elmira a menudo llaman la “ciudad donde uno se crio”. Examino las narrativas de los guardianes de prisión sobre sus encuentros raciales dentro y fuera de la prisión, su sentido de sí mismos como personas racializadas, y su relación con lo que ellos ven frecuentemente como trabajo aburridor, violento y estigmatizado. Muestro cómo la expansión del estado carcelario en los últimos cuarenta años, el período más a menudo referido como encarcelación masiva, mantiene unas jerarquías de labor del fordismo en una racialización reorganizada: como carcelero y encarcelado. prisiones, blanquitud, estado carcelario, capitalismo racial, posfordismo
Spatial Mismatch theory is one of the theories that examine poverty and inequality in the social-Spatial structure of cities. The aim of the present study was to "conceptually explain the grounds for ...Spatial Mismatch of work and residence", especially in the cities of developing countries and Iran. This research is theoretical-applied in nature and descriptive-analytical in terms of method. In addition, discourse analysis has been used to explain the fields of formation and the lack of Spatial Mismatch. According to the findings of the present study, Spatial Mismatches in the Great Fields (global and Inclusive changes such as the expansion of Ford-Keynesian and neoliberal , Post Fordism) and its most objective layer (the inequality between access to Appropriate work and access to housing in urban structure and space), are similar.However, geographically, the focus of Spatial Mismatch in developing countries, in contrast to the US, is mostly on the suburb of cities.While Spatial Mismatch in the United States is influenced by unequal racial-ethnic contexts, development of transportation technology, suburbanization, industrialization, and the establishment of industries and factories, in developing countries it is mainly due to its "unequal structure of international economic relations," "implementation." External development strategies include "unequal socio-spatial construction", "getting caught up in the traps of development traps" (political instability, selling natural resources, spreading the consequences of neighborly instability, inefficient governance), and “traps of poverty and corruption" and “unstable pattern of urban development".
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